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MODULE TWO

PARTICIPANT WORKBOOK FOR DIALOGUE ACROSS DIFFERENCES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reading assignment: White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack 84

Reading assignment: MAKING DIFFERENCES MATTER: 90

Dominant-Subordinate group matrix 96

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES 97

CONDITIONING SCREENS 98

DIALOGUE SKILLS 99

Eight Strategies for Breakthrough in Systems Change……………..100

EVALUATION FORM 101

Reading Assignment

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group

Peggy McIntosh

Through work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women's status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there are most likely a phenomenon of while privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see on of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in Women's Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, "Having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"

After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow "them" to be more like "us".

I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographical location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can see, my African American coworkers, friends and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place, and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions.

I usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work to systematically over-empower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex.

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

6. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

7. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

9. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods, which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can cut my hair.

10. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

11. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.

12. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.

13. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

16. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

17. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

18. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in charge," I will be facing a person of my race.

19. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race.

20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my race.

21. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, out numbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.

22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.

23. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.

24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.

25. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.

26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in flesh color and have them more or less match my skin.

I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.

In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of daily experience that I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these prerequisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant.

I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways, and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.

In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit in turn upon people of color. For this reason, the word "privilege" now seems to me misleading. We want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred systematically. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.

We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages, which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantages, which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power that I originally saw as attendant on being a human being in the U.S. consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance.

I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance and if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the U.S. think that racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see "whiteness" as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.

Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantaging associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage that rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 continues to remind us eloquently. One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms that we can see and embedded forms that as a member of the dominant group one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.

Disapproving of the systems won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. But a white skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end, these problems.

To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to be now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly acculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power, and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.

Though systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.

Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the Wellesley Collage Center for Research on Women. This essay is excerpted from Working Paper 189. "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies" (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $4.00 from the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley MA 02181 The working paper contains a longer list of privileges.

RELEVANCE TO CARE?

People repeatedly forget that they have identities that confer Dominant Group Membership privileges. Understand the ways you enjoy unearned privilege [through gender, class, religion, race, ethnicity, language etc.] and how unearned privilege impacts your relationships with others.

Activity – After reading this article, prepare your own privilege list. Then reflect on how this can impact your work at CARE and your relationships with others

Reading Assignment

MAKING DIFFERENCES MATTER:

A NEW PARADIGM FOR MANAGING DIVERSITY

by David A. Thomas and Robin J. Ely

Harvard Business Review (Sep. ‘96/Oct. ’96)

Summarized by Mary Picard

This article is about diversity efforts in the workplace. (Although this article deals with the context of corporate America, the differences in how diversity is viewed and addressed can apply to our context in CARE as well.) The authors articulate three different paradigms – two current and one emerging paradigm for addressing diversity. They explain why the two common paradigms applied to date – the discrimination-and-fairness paradigm and the access-and-legitimacy paradigm often end up fueling tensions and rarely spur the leaps in organizational effectiveness that are possible. They show how the third paradigm – learning-and-effectiveness – offers more promise for understanding and leveraging diversity.

Premises: There is a distinct way to unleash the powerful benefits of a diverse workforce. Although these benefits include increased profitability, they go beyond financial measures to encompass learning, creativity, flexibility, organizational and individual growth, and the ability of a company to adjust rapidly and successfully to market changes. The desired transformation, however, requires a fundamental change in the attitudes and behaviors of an organization's leadership. And that will come only when senior managers abandon an underlying and flawed assumption about diversity and replace it with a broader understanding.

The Discrimination-and-Fairness Paradigm

It is based on the recognition that discrimination is wrong. In this paradigm, workplace diversity is about increasing racial, national, gender, or class representation -- in other words, recruiting and retaining more people from traditionally underrepresented "identity groups." Leaders who look at diversity through this lens usually focus on equal opportunity, fair treatment, recruitment, and compliance with federal Equal Employment Opportunity requirements. Progress is measured by how well the company achieves its recruitment and retention goals rather than by the degree to which conditions in the company allow employees to draw on their personal assets and perspectives to do their work more effectively. The staff, one might say, gets diversified, but the work does not.

Emphasizes assimilation. In this paradigm underrepresented groups, such as women and people of color, are encouraged and expected to blend in. It is not desirable for diversification of the workforce to influence the organization's work or culture. The company should operate as if every person were of the same race, gender, and nationality. Moreover it insists that everyone is the same, but, with its emphasis on equal treatment, it puts pressure on employees to make sure that important differences among them do not count. Genuine disagreements about work definition, therefore, are sometimes wrongly interpreted through this paradigm's fairness-unfairness lens -- especially when honest disagreements are accompanied by tense debate. A female employee who insists, for example, that a company's advertising strategy is not appropriate for all ethnic segments in the marketplace might feel she is violating the code of assimilation upon which the paradigm is built. Moreover, if she were then to defend her opinion by citing, let us say, her personal knowledge of the ethnic group the company wanted to reach, she might risk being perceived as importing inappropriate attitudes into an organization that prides itself on being blind to cultural differences. By not allowing staff to openly acknowledge culturally based differences, the paradigm actually undermines the organization's capacity to learn about and improve its own strategies, processes, and practices. And it also keeps people from identifying strongly and personally with their work -- a critical source of motivation and self-regulation in any business environment.

It is not unusual for a company under this paradigm to set apart underrepresented staff in jobs that relate specifically to their backgrounds, assigning them, for example, to areas that require them to interface with clients or customers of the same identity group. The main virtue identity groups have to offer, in this paradigm, is knowledge of their own people. But then clashes may arise when such groups propose different ways of working or are not given the authority to challenge the company’s assumptions or approaches

But as the authors conclude, the paradigm’s assumptions are limited, limiting and detrimental to diversity efforts. Increasing demographic variation does not in itself increase organizational effectiveness. It is how a company defines diversity -- and what it does with the experiences of being a diverse organization -- that delivers on the promise.

The Access-and-Legitimacy Paradigm

It celebrates differences (differentiation). Under it, organizations seek access to a more diverse clientele, matching their demographics to targeted consumers. Its worldview: We are living in an increasingly multicultural country, and new ethnic groups are quickly gaining consumer power. Our company needs a demographically more diverse workforce to help us gain access to these differentiated segments. We need employees with multilingual skills in order to understand and serve our customers better and to gain legitimacy with them. Diversity isn't just fair; it makes business sense.

Companies using this paradigm may be too quick to push staff with niche capabilities into differentiated pigeonholes without trying to understand what their capabilities really are and how they could be integrated into the company's mainstream work. In this paradigm, difference is valued but not enough to integrate it into the core of its culture and business practice.

This paradigm can leave employees of different identity-group affiliations feeling marginalized, pigeonholed or exploited. Also, many of these people say that when companies have needed to downsize or narrow their marketing focus, it is the special departments (niches) that are often the first to go. That situation creates tenuous and ultimately untenable career paths for employees in the special departments.

Learning-and-effectiveness paradigm – the emerging one

Emphasizes integration. This paradigm is showing that beneficial learning takes place and organizations become more effective in fulfilling their missions if employees are encouraged to tap their differences for creative ideas. In this paradigm, diversity lets the organization internalize differences among employees so that it learns and grows because of them. Indeed, with the model fully in place, members of the organization can say, “We are all on the same team, with our differences -- not despite them.”

Leaders in third-paradigm companies are proactive about learning from diversity; they encourage people to make explicit use of cultural experience at work; they fight all forms of dominance and subordination, including those generated by one functional group acting superior to another; and they ensure that the inevitable tensions that come from a genuine effort to make way for diversity are acknowledged and resolved with sensitivity.

The authors cite eight preconditions for making the paradigm shift:

1. The leadership must understand that a diverse workforce will embody different perspectives and approaches to work, and must truly value variety of opinion and insight. It is about making the link between different identity groups and different approaches to how work gets done and that there is more than one right way to get positive results.

2. The leadership must recognize both the learning opportunities and the challenges that the expression of different perspectives presents for an organization. In other words, the leadership needs to be committed to persevering during the long process of learning and relearning that the new paradigm requires.

3. The organizational culture must create an expectation of high standards of performance from everyone. Such a culture isn't one that expects less from some employees than from others. Some organizations expect women and people of color to underperform -- a negative assumption that too often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A company must believe that all its members can and should contribute fully.

4. The organizational culture must stimulate personal development. Such a culture brings out people's full range of useful knowledge and skills-usually through the careful design of jobs that allow people to grow and develop but also through training and education programs.

5. The organizational culture must encourage openness. Such a culture instills a high tolerance for debate and supports constructive conflict on work-related matters.

6. The culture must make workers feel valued. If this precondition is met, workers feel committed to -- and empowered within -- the organization and therefore feel comfortable taking the initiative to apply their skills and experiences in new ways to enhance their job performance.

7. The organization must have a well-articulated and widely understood mission. Such a mission enables people to be clear about what the company is trying to accomplish. It grounds and guides discussions about work-related changes that staff members might suggest. Being clear about the company's mission helps keep discussions about work differences from degenerating into debates about the validity of people's perspectives. A clear mission provides a focal point that keeps the discussion centered on accomplishment of goals.

8. The organization must have a relatively egalitarian, nonbureaucratic structure. It's important to have a structure that promotes the exchange of ideas and welcomes constructive challenges to the usual way of doing things-from any employee with valuable experience. Forward-thinking leaders in bureaucratic organizations must retain the organization's efficiency-promoting control systems and chains of command while finding ways to reshape the change-resisting mind-set of the classic bureaucratic model. They need to separate the enabling elements of bureaucracy (the ability to get things done) from the disabling elements of bureaucracy (those that create resistance to experimentation).

Some of the lessons learned from organizations that have gone through the paradigm shift show that four types of action are essential:

1. Need to actively seek opportunities to explore how identity-group differences affect relationships among workers and affect the way work gets done. Need to invest considerable time and energy in understanding how identity-group memberships take on social meanings in the organization and how those meanings manifest themselves in the way work is defined, assigned, and accomplished. When there is no proactive search to understand, then learning from diversity, if it happens at all, can occur only reactively -- that is, in response to diversity-related crises.

2. Allow open discussion about how identity-group memberships inform and influence an employee's experience and the organization's behavior. When people believe that they must suggest and apply their ideas covertly, the organization also misses opportunities to discuss, debate, refine, and build on those ideas fully. In addition, because individuals will continue to think that they must hide parts of themselves in order to fit in, they will find it difficult to engage fully not only in their work but also in their workplace relationships. That kind of situation can breed resentment and misunderstanding, fueling tensions that can further obstruct productive work relationships.

3. Various forms of dominance can occur in the workplace that in turn affects an individual’s performance and commitment. Beyond explicitly forbidding any forms of dominance, leaders can and should test their own assumptions about the competencies of all members of the workforce because negative assumptions are often unconsciously communicated in powerful -- albeit nonverbal -- ways.

4. Leaders must make sure that organizational trust stays intact and that their organizations remain “safe” places for employees to be themselves. Few things are faster at killing a shift to a new way of thinking about diversity than feelings of broken trust. Tensions naturally arise as an organization begins to make room for diversity, people start to experiment with process and product ideas, and the managers learn to reappraise its mission in light of suggestions from newly empowered constituents in the company. But as people put more of themselves out and open up about new feelings and ideas, the dynamics can produce temporary vulnerabilities. Managers who have helped their organizations make the change successfully have consistently demonstrated their commitment to the process and to all employees by setting a tone of honest discourse, by acknowledging tensions, and by resolving them sensitively and swiftly.

An example:

A law firm Dewey & Levin hired a Hispanic female attorney. The partners' hope, simply put, was that she would bring in clients from her own community and also demonstrate the firm's commitment to representing all women. But something even bigger than that happened. The new attorney introduced ideas to Dewey & Levin about what kinds of cases it should take on. Senior managers were open to those ideas and pursued them with great success. More women of color were hired, and they, too, brought fresh perspectives. The firm now pursues cases that its previously all-white legal staff would not have thought relevant or appropriate because the link between the firm's mission and the employment issues involved in the cases would not have been obvious to them. For example, the firm has pursued precedent-setting litigation that challenges English-only policies -- an area that it once would have ignored because such policies did not fall under the purview of traditional affirmative-action work. Yet it now sees a link between English-only policies and employment issues for a large group of women -- primarily recent immigrants-whom it had previously failed to serve adequately. As one of the white principals explains, the demographic composition of Dewey & Levin "has affected the work in terms of expanding notions of what are [relevant] issues and taking on issues and framing them in creative ways that would have never been done [with an all-white staff]. It's really changed the substance -- and in that sense enhanced the quality -- of our work."

Dominant-Subordinate group matrix

In intergroup relations, power dynamics usually revolve around those with power and those without power. In other words, people belonging to the group with more power by virtue of their identity have Dominant Group Membership. Those belonging to the group with less power by virtue of their identity have Subordinate Group Membership[1].

Some factors to consider in group dynamics:

← Because everyone has multiple and changing group memberships, many people experience both Dominant and Subordinate Group Membership sometime in their lives.

← Dominant Groups do not necessarily constitute the majority groups [13% of world’s population is white].

← Subordinate Group Membership does not suggest ‘submissive’ attributes of its members.

← Dominant and Subordinate group dynamics exist everywhere in the world

|DOMINANT GROUPS |SUBORDINATE GROUPS |

|See themselves as individuals |Are aware of their ‘groupness’ |

|See their behavior as normal |Often experience themselves as outsiders or different from the |

| |dominant group |

|Benefit from an environment structured according to their |Must assimilate to dominant group in order to advance. Often |

|norms, leading them to see subordinated groups as substandard |internalize dominant groups’ beliefs of their lack of worth |

|See subordinate members as a part of a group or carry negative|Know more about dominant groups than dominant groups know about them|

|judgments about them [Projection]. | |

|Have the power to limit access to resources and/or behavioral |Have curtailed access to resources |

|options to non-group members | |

|Have advantages they did not earn by deeds, but merely by |Work extra hard for the same status or advantages enjoyed by the |

|virtue of some identity attribute |dominant group |

|Are unconscious of their privilege and how it is embedded |Are often painfully conscious of their lack of privilege and the |

|within the norms and structures of society |unfriendly norms to which they have to conform |

|Encourages subordinate members to develop behaviors pleasing |Develop characteristics intended to please dominant group members |

|to dominant members | |

|Focus on one’s intent rather than the outcome |Focus on the impact/outcome of behaviors |

|Do not understand subordinate group realities |Often adopt the norms and realities of the dominant group in order |

| |to advance and/or survive |

|See own group as superior or see a few ‘good ones’ as |Sometimes imitate dominant members and/or act destructively toward |

|exceptions to the subordinate group’s norm |other subordinate group members for survival |

|See incidents of discrimination as individual actions of other|Identify patterns of behavior quickly because of repeated treatment |

|people that have nothing to do with them. |[Collective impact] |

|Subtly require other dominant members not to get too close to |Do not always react directly and honestly to negative treatment but |

|subordinate members |rather indirectly and covertly |

|Often encourage dissention between and among subordinate |Often distance themselves from one another in order to fit in or |

|groups |advance in the system |

|Do not think of themselves as oppressors |Have solidarity with one another due to shared struggle |

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES[2]

In multi-cultural studies, two primary types of cultures have been identified: high-context [or ‘being’] cultures, and low-context [or ‘doing’] cultures.

High-context cultures are those in which the group shares a large range of experiences, beliefs, and assumptions. Interactions occur within that shared context, which is known to all and often unspoken. The culture is more interested in the quality of relationships within that context than in accomplishing tasks. Examples of high-context cultures include most traditional Asian, African, Latin American, African American and Indigenous cultures.

Low-context cultures are those in which individuals are not so highly socialized into the same set of beliefs, assumptions and behavioral norms, and so are more concerned with the individual and what s/he does than with the quality of relationships. Examples of low-context cultures: highly industrialized societies, such as in the U.S. [Caucasian] and Europe.

These distinctions are of course not rigid or pure as many cultures are in flux and there exist sub-cultures within larger cultures. That said, the general characteristics of these two types of culture are:

|Low-Context/’Doing’ Cultures |High-Context, ‘Being’ Cultures |

|Focus is on individual |Focus is on group (family or clan) |

|Emphasizes getting the job done |Emphasizes quality of relationships |

|Sees time as linear |Sees time as cyclical |

|Speaks in rational, declarative mode |Speaks in stories, metaphors |

|Is present and future oriented |Sees past as essential part of present/future |

|Is merit-based |Is shame-based[3] (saving ‘face’*) |

|Sees nature as something to control |Sees nature as essential part of life |

|‘I’ identified |‘We’ identified |

|Values individual wants and needs |Values group wants and needs |

|Speaks directly, ask for what you want |Speaks indirectly, doesn’t refer to self |

|Is rewarded for accomplishments |Is rewarded for alignment with group norms |

|Serves personal needs first |Serves group needs first |

Questions for Reflection:

← What is my cultural context?

← Given my cultural context, what do I need to do in order to appreciate the different contributions that others can bring?

← What are some possible stereotypes I hold about other cultural contexts?

CONDITIONING SCREENS[4]

What are ‘Conditioning Screens’?

Everyone has a set of perceptual screens through which they view (or hear) others. These screens are built up over time and reinforced by four interconnected factors that keep us from seeing each other as we truly are in this moment.

1. Repeated Messages – words, phrases, ideas, images we receive over and over again from the media, from our parents, and in our social milieu. Examples: for women, that thin is beautiful; for white people, that white is normative and superior.

2. Historical Resonance – historical traumas, experienced at the individual or group level that still resonate in current situations and color the present with feelings and assumptions carried over from the past. Examples: the lasting effects of slavery and Jim Crow; anti-semitism and the Holocaust.

3. Current Realities – real situations in the present experience of people that reinforce Repeated Messages and trigger Historical Resonance. Examples: an incident of violent gay bashing; racial profiling by the police; structural inequities in housing or education.

4. The Collective Unconscious – basic assumptions that are buried deeply in the consciousness yet affect one’s actions. Example: association of white with good and pure; black with dark and evil.

How do Conditioning Screens affect our work at CARE?

• It can contribute to or exacerbate a perception of discrimination, marginalization, or victimhood;

• It can contribute to a sense of ‘us versus them’;

• It can be become an unconscious and unspoken sub-text to current relationships;

• It can be an obstacle to our meeting people as they truly are, and to being in a conversation or a relationship of unconditional regard.

How can I, as a manager, be sensitive to addressing this phenomenon?

• Be aware that the phenomenon exists.

• Be alert to places where your own experience of the four Conditioning Screens may be distorting your view of a situation or of another

• Be attentive to possible moments when other peoples’ experience of the four Conditioning Screens may be distorting their view of a situation or of you.

If you sense these screens may be distorting a communication or a relationship, try to name the experience you are having. Bringing these issues into consciousness, without blame or shame, can turn the situation into a learning experience.

DIALOGUE SKILLS

• Discovery mode: to understand; willingness to be changed

• Sharing Truth: sharing truth of your personal experience; ‘I’ statements

• Active Listening: giving full attention to content, meaning, feelings

• Surfacing Assumptions: uncover beliefs that underlie opinions, ‘facts’

• Suspending Judgments: put judgments aside to hear better

• Attending to the ‘whole’: notice themes, patterns and implications

Eight Strategies for Breakthrough in Systems Change

1. Know that energy follows thought; what you give your attention to, you energize or strengthen.

2. Put your self-limiting beliefs aside.

3. Remember that if you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got. Start with awareness of habitual patterns, then do it differently.

4. See the desired end state as already true; describe it, act as if it were so.

5. Build on your experience of success; gather and appreciate your existing wisdom.

6. Use right-brain methods of generating creative options.

7. Be a model, a mirror, and a magnet for the change you seek.

8. Declare what you want to achieve; declare collectively, then do what it takes to make it happen.

EVALUATION FORM

DIALOGUE ACROSS DIFFERENCES

1. Overall quality of the training:

Poor……………………………………………………………………………………..Excellent

Scale: 1 2 3 4 5

a. What were helpful elements of the program?

b. Not helpful elements of the program? How can they be improved?

c. Other topics or training to use in future sessions?

2. Rate the trainer(s) on the following characteristics:

Poor………………………………………………………………………………………Excellent

Scale: 1 2 3 4 5

Responses:

a. clarity of presentations: 1 2 3 4 5

b. knowledge of subject: 1 2 3 4 5

c. team work: 1 2 3 4 5

d. flexibility: 1 2 3 4 5

e. ability to facilitate useful learning experience:

1 2 3 4 5

3. Additional Feedback for trainer(s)?

4. Two things you learned or re-learned today? Share highlights.

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[1] This piece builds upon the work of Elsie Cross Associates, Louise Diamond, Pat Battle and Joy Shiferaw.

[2] This information is based on the work of Edward T. Hall.

[3] *’Face’ refers to honor. Thus one loses ‘face’ if one is embarrassed, humiliated, disrespected, or otherwise dishonored in front of others. It is important not only to save one’s own ‘face’ but also to insure that one is not the cause of another losing ‘face.’ Thus a person in this type of culture would never do anything that might embarrass another or make them feel bad (e.g., might not say ‘no’ to a request because it might make the asker feel bad).

[4] Developed by Pat Battle and Louise Diamond

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Repeated Messages

Current Realities

Historical Resonance

Collective Unconscious

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